Overlay System

[RPC]

Is it possible to have an overlay system that would work like the modular ships in Battleships Forever and Gratuitous Space Battles?
I envision that overlays could have weapons (turrets + firearcs >:D ), armors, and their own shields.
The problem is if overlays as of right now can be smooth enough to make it look nice (as I can fake most of the above through code).
Any ideas?

[matix]

I've played battleships forever, and bringing a system like that to Trans would be amazing

[Aury]

I've pestered george about letting us have overlay turrets, but nothing has come of that yet.

[george moromisato]

This might help:

http://neurohack.com/transcendence/foru ... lay+device

[Aury]

But that won't actually give us indep. rotating turrets.

[george moromisato]

But that won't actually give us indep. rotating turrets.

You're right; you would have to call objSetOverlayRotation from inside OnFireWeapon (or something).

[Aury]

That... is very interesting! I didn't even know that we could do that.

Now if only we could get it to track the target nicely...

Maybe an <onTargeting> event that occurs whenever a turreted/swivel weapon has a target within range, and provides variables giving the target, the direction from the /weapon/ (esp. important on large ships targeting close-by ships), etc.

[alterecco]

Don't we have code that lets us target perfectly? If you just have a loop running that targets the closest ship, or some other algorithm, then you would have independently rotating turrets.

[Aury]

But would we know that is what is actually being targeted by that weapon?

[alterecco]

That what is?

[Aury]

The closest enemy ship. The ship may be assigned a target, the closest ship might be out of the fire arc. There are a lot of variables to consider.

[alterecco]

That is what you would write an algorithm to solve :) But targeting the nearest ship is a good place to start.

[Aury]

Another problem is when you have a weirdly shaped ship and parts of it would need to occlude the turrets on it.

[christian]

the ships would probably have to be larger to use those rolating turrets...such as Britania like-size...

[Song]

A further note for this: This would, if adapted, make the current Auton AI actually function in combat without having to be told to attack things. Currently autons have forward-facing weapons, so they can either follow the ship, or turn to attack an enemy...and following takes priority, so they usually never fire their guns while following the player. A system used for modular construction could probably be modified so that a ship can thrust "Forward" in one direction, while actually facing and firing in another. Normally that'd be fairly cheatish, but for autons it might work (the Tenhove autosentinel [yeah, not technically an auton] in particular, since it *looks* like it has a turret but it actually doesn't.)